Microsoft Detailed the Use of Touch in the New Office

It’s no doubt that Office 2013 is made and aimed for Windows 8. So it has to be designed to make both touch and keyboard/mice world happy. And Microsoft detailed what they did trying to achieve this on their official Office Next blog.

Guidelines for touch

5 areas to target:

Touch responsiveness

Touch targeting

Selecting text & objects

Typing

Commanding

Here are the demo videos they shared on their Facebook page that covers these guidelines.

Touch responsiveness:

Text and Object selection:

Typing:

Excel’s Flash Fill:

Mail Triage (the mail bar):

Radial menus in OneNote:

Touch Mode

A new feature called Touch Mode that basically increases the size of the fixed UI when turned on, including the size of the QAT, Ribbon tabs, spacing around small buttons in the ribbon, the height of the status bar, etc.. It’s automatically turned on for properly configured tablet machines.

Here is a screenshot of Word when Touch Mode is off:

And here is what it looks like when Touch Mode is on:

MiniBar

The MiniBar, which was first introduced in Office 2007, is also got improved with a contextual menu drop down from it.

If you have a touch device that runs Windows 8, you can experience the most of these new touch designs by trying out the OneNote MX preview metro app.